PHENOMENOLOGY, LAW, AND THE POLITICAL A METHODICAL REFLECTION ON FIRST-PERSON INQUIRY, NORMATIVE ORDERS, AND ACTION

In this paper, I investigate in which sense phenomenology as a first-person inquiry can or cannot address the phenomenon of law. Since law has been traditionally defined as a system of norms or a normative order, it is not immediately clear in which way a first-person approach regarding the experience and givenness of … should yield elucidating insights about the phenomenon in question. The differences of the various phenomenological approaches to law partly root in how they deal with this issue. In my paper, (1) I present five different approaches how phenomenology can relate to law and legal theory in general. (2) Then I move to phenomenology as a first-person inquiry and problematize how such an inquiry, even if it deals with intersubjective and social phenomena, can or cannot approach the phenomenon of law. (3) Finally, I propose, as one of the ways of doing phenomenology of law, to combine it with the perspective of the political. For this I will look at Arendt’s theory of action and how it relates to law. I work out how, from the perspective of a phenomenology of action and plurality, law appears in the multivalent character of petrifying action, of emerging from it and of enabling it. I propose a methodically reflected approach how the phenomenon of law could be tackled from this perspective.